World hunger is the result of politics, not production
We can’t know when the next famine will occur, but it will be a by-product of war and politics.
NewStatewsman
18 November 2015
“If you had asked most mainstream development experts in the year 2000 to name those factors they thought would most imperil their efforts to reduce poverty globally in the new millennium, it is highly unlikely they would have mentioned a sudden radical spike in the price of the principal agricultural commodities, and the staple foods made from them, on which the poor of the world literally depended for their survival.” By 2006, as David Rieff goes on to show, prices of wheat, rice, corn and soybeans began to rise steeply on world markets. In Egypt, the price of bread doubled in a matter of months, and by some measures the food bill of the world’s poor rose by roughly 40 per cent. The result, in 30 of the world’s worst-affected countries, from Ethiopia to Uzbekistan, was a rash of bread riots. Food prices peaked in 2008, but rose again, almost as sharply, in 2010 and 2011, and the rising cost of bread was among the triggers of the Arab spring.
Why were the experts so unprepared? one reason is that most of them believed that a formula for ridding the world of poverty had been found. All that was needed was the will to apply it, and this determination already existed in the many transnational institutions and NGOs dedicated to eliminating hunger. As Rieff writes, “The consensus in the development world is that the early 21st century really marks the ‘end-time’ for extreme poverty and hunger.” The Reproach of Hunger challenges this consensus, showing it for what it is – an ideology that simplifies the causes of extreme poverty and systematically underestimates the difficulties of eradicating it.
Rieff’s insight that the development consensus is ideological in nature is crucial for understanding the flaws in current thinking about hunger. The movement against global poverty imagines that it transcends political divisions yet it demands deep changes in the prevailing world order. Some in the movement want to insulate food from global markets; others favour “philanthrocapitalism” – a benignly transformed utopian variation on the existing economic system. But what all versions of the ruling consensus on hunger have in common is that they promote a radical political programme yet refuse to think politically about the limits of what can be achieved.
Chronic malnutrition and famine cannot be understood, let alone prevented, if they are detached from the realities of power. Consider the role of war. As Rieff writes, “While there have been famines in times of peace, there have been few major wars without famine.” Somewhere between 50 and 72 million people died on account of the Second World War. Roughly 20 million deaths were caused by hunger, about half of them in the Soviet Union. The famine in Greece in 1941-42, when some 300,000 people perished out of a population of less than 7.5 million, was mainly a result of plunder by German occupying forces and a British naval blockade. Exacerbated by a harsh winter, the last European famine of the Second World War occurred in those regions of the Netherlands still under German occupation in 1944-45.
Going further back, the Great Irish Famine of 1845-50 and the Great Bengal Famine of 1943-44 were both artefacts of imperial rule. The Soviet famine under Lenin in 1920-22 occurred during a civil war, but the famine in Ukraine in 1932-33 was a direct result of Stalin’s policies of collectivisation. The Chinese famine of 1958-62, which Rieff describes as “probably the most lethal single event in history”, was caused largely by Mao’s disastrous rush to industrialisation. Summing up, Rieff writes: “To the extent that one can view the last part of the 19th century as the age of imperialist famines, it is equally appropriate to view much of the 20th century as the age of socialist ones.”
All these famines were a result of the exercise of power. None of them came about because of the gap between food production and a rising population postulated in the theories of Thomas Malthus. Yet the clergyman-economist, whose forebodings are dismissed nowadays by citing the enormous increases in agricultural productivity achieved over the past decades, may yet have a point with regard to the future. “The stark fact is that to avoid famine recurring throughout a world that now has seven billion people and will almost certainly add two billion more by 2050, and possibly another billion in the two decades after that, agricultural production will have to increase unceasingly,” Rieff writes.
Maybe this increase will occur. GM crops may enhance agricultural productivity in the 21st century as the Green Revolution did in the 20th, while the dire effects of climate change – in many countries a grave threat to food production – may somehow be neutralised. Yet even if so, it does not follow that hunger can be eradicated any time soon. Those who look to technology for a quick fix to hunger assume that the global food crisis is fundamentally a problem of supply: in fact, it is largely a matter of distribution. The crucial preventative of chronic hunger and famine is not technology but access to food, which can only be secured by having decent and effective governance.
This is the message of the Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen, whose work has had such a formative effect on thinking about development. Sen has declared that “famines are easy to prevent if there is a serious effort to do so, and a democratic government, facing elections and criticisms from opposition parties, and independent newspapers, cannot help but make such an effort”. He cites as evidence for this view India, which has not suffered famine since the end of British rule. Yet if democracy is what is needed, famine will not be easy to prevent. Sen published his declaration in 1999, a time suffused by democratic triumphalism. The picture looks rather different today. Is there anyone – aside from incorrigibly delusional liberal interventionists – who believes that functioning democracy is possible in Syria or Libya in the near or medium-term future? Equally, is it true that only democracy can reliably prevent famine? one need not be an uncritical admirer of the post-Mao regime in China to accept that it has presided over the biggest and fastest decline in extreme poverty in history. The largest obstacle to preventing hunger in recent years has been failed states, not a lack of democracy.
The conquest of hunger is as much a matter of politics as it is one of food production, if not more so; and the politics of hunger is not at all simple. As long as there are wars, civil conflicts and collapsed states there will be hunger, sometimes chronic and extreme. But no public official will admit this fact. To the ruling culture in development agencies, well captured by Rieff, realistic thinking is a type of sacrilege against humanity:
There has come to be something almost impious in denying that all societies and all human problems this side of mortality can be radically made over and suffering brought to an end. And by definition, in a progress narrative, the good eventually triumphs and the bad is defeated. In this universe, perhaps more emotional (not to say narcissistic) than it is moral in the proper sense, it is almost an assertion of one’s membership in the party of the good not to treat sceptically the claims that the world is on the cusp of being made anew that are routinely made by development and aid officials from major Western governments.